Business Unit Strategy

We support business leaders on bold strategic journeys, grounded in unparalleled empirical and social insights, to beat the market.

For 80 years, we have worked with Global 2000 companies in many business sector. Now, with radical cost innovations and rapid changes in technology building and shifting value like never before, we know businesses need more than simple analytical frameworks to succeed.

That's why we've created an innovative new approach to developing and delivering business strategy. It's not new theories backed by a few isolated cases but rather a highly calibrated, data-driven strategy, built on large-sample learning and behavioral insights.

This knowledge is powerful.We know that some companies can make big moves into the top quintile of economic profit, where all the value is captured. We also know that the odds are narrow—1 in 10—which is daunting. But by combining creative insights with our unique access to over half a century of data on corporate performance, we can help you identify the levers you need to pull to increase your probability of success.

In other words, you can beat the odds.

Here's how we do it: The empirical revolution

Our new empirical approach to strategy offers you a bolder path to making big moves. Tools such as our Corporate Performance Analysis Tool (CPAT) offer detailed financial metrics across the globe, covering market capitalization of the world's companies.

We bring privileged insights into these data, enabling you to calibrate the odds of your success and put your money where your strategy is. This involves harnessing the empirical revolution to understand your company's endowment—its size, level of productivity, and capital structure—as well as the trends you are exposed to and the big moves you can make to shift your position.

Our strategy methodDisruption is nothing new—think about how PCs replaced mainframes or how mini-mills upended the giants of American steel in the 1970s. But now industries are undergoing more radical upheavals that produce more unpredictable results, more often.

A 5-year framework can't adapt at the pace our rapidly changing world demands.

That's why we have a proven method to work with our clients on a strategy journey. Your top team won't be bystanders. Leaders will be active participants, working hard to bust their own myths and grapple with the issues so they can commit to new approaches.

We support you to frame the decisions, interrogate why you create value, forecast a range of alternative futures, test potential pathways, choose a coherent approach, commit by allocating resources, and position your company to consistently evolve its strategy over time as you learn more.

Ten Timeless TestsLet's face it: the fundamental principles of good strategy are often obscured by a blizzard of business data or overlooked in pursuit of the next new thing. To help executives assess the strength of their strategies, we have condensed the many ideas about strategy into ten core principles—our 10 Timeless Tests of Strategy. You can use these tests to measure the effectiveness of your strategy and define what market-beating strategy looks like for you.

Recent work

A global telecommunications company needed to fundamentally rethink its consumer strategy and business model to prepare for a different future, in which new competitors would bring significant change and uncertainty.

We worked to deconstruct the existing company model around value chains rather than traditional business units. We identified the most important industry trends and developed potential future scenarios to frame the debate around business-model trade-offs. This brought clarity to different combinations of choices. Together, we assessed those choices against four levers: economic feasibility, future resilience, alignment with the customer, and competitive positioning.

This strategy revealed the true sources of business value and proved that the current business model would not achieve the company's goals. We facilitated simple, structured, fact-based decision making to arrive at the best alternative model, and we defined the operational implications of moving to a new model.